Royal Gramma Scraping Sandbed

jms020999 · Sep 9, 2020

My new Royal Gramma has some very small spots on him. Its hard to tell in the pictures but he some small spots and is scraping on the sandbed sometimes... What should I do I have a reef tank with corals. I think it would be impossible to catch him and put him in a seperate tank

I assume it will also affect my clownfish possibly. Is ich a death sentence can fish survive it without taking my tank apart then treating them with copper?

lazycouch · Sep 10, 2020

pull him out and dip him in fresh rodi. you want your water temperature stable and lower your salinity if possible to prevent the ich from spreading; make sure your sump is running with quickest flow as possible with not many obstacles to go through because you also want the pump cycling water quickly. if you cant pull him out and is still eating, mix a combination of metroplex and focus into the frozen food. you can do this regardless to make sure you prevent your other fish from getting infected any further if they've already been

Ribo15 · Sep 10, 2020

You have 2 options manage the ich or eradicate the ich. I’m currently going through the management option right now as I was being very careful with keeping ich out and it still got in. Now I’m just seeing what happens with stable params, good food, UV and ich... so far many fish have shown spots some once some it’s come and give a few times but haven’t lost a fish yet. My blue regal and coral beauty seem to be the most affected but they don’t scratch and have healthy appetites so we will see

Jay Hemdal · Sep 10, 2020

jms020999 said:
My new Royal Gramma has some very small spots on him. Its hard to tell in the pictures but he some small spots and is scraping on the sandbed sometimes... What should I do I have a reef tank with corals. I think it would be impossible to catch him and put him in a seperate tank
I assume it will also affect my clownfish possibly. Is ich a death sentence can fish survive it without taking my tank apart then treating them with copper?

Sorry, the videos won’t play for me. Don’t do a FW dip for ich, the extra stress it causes just makes the fish open to infection from the tomites that are still in the tank. You can try the management angle, but if the number of trophonts on the fish reach a tipping point, you’ll have an acute infection and will lose the fish. Where is that tipping point? Hard to say, but if I see more than about 15 spots on one side of a fish, I’ll call it and move them to a QT and treat with copper.
Jay